The everyday contributions of a multi-disciplinary writer and researcher to his own projects

Never Give Up on a Better Society, Jamming, 07/12/2016

Nothing too big today. It’s been a pretty strenuous past week, and I’m glad I kept up on the writing work for my work, my my creative projects, and the blog that I set for myself.

Last night, my local New Democratic Party district association held its annual general meeting. It was a pretty nice evening – I’m the Vice President, Dynamic is still the President and seriously kicked up his public speaking game working for Bernie Sanders.

Jagmeet Singh, the Ontario Deputy Leader, was there to give a short speech and a much longer Q&A session with members. I tweeted a photo with a compliment for a wise outreach strategy he discussed – We shouldn’t run our campaigns and outreach based on fear of right-wing leaders, but on the values and policies that we’d bring to Ontario and Canada.

My photo of our decently-attended riding association, as JagmeetSingh fields questions. He's a wonderful speaker and a damn goodpolitician, but I found his session a little too willing to coast onsoftball questions that he already had prepared material for.

Policies like ending the privatization of our power resources, and investing in that electricity infrastructure that can generate a lot of revenue for the Ontarian state. Revenue that we can use to rebuild our health and education systems, invest in public transit for our cities and improved roads for our rural regions.

Values like working to build a society where people treat each other with mutual respect. Where people can build communities that are stronger for their diversity, where everyone can pursue a career and a life with dignity. Where our governments, no matter who might be in charge, are always accountable to us.

By the end of the night, I’d already been trolled – being called a party full of losers, and having some twat say we can solve Ontario’s problems by deporting all our refugees. They are what we call unreachable.

I found a way to get involved with the state and local social movement politics of my new city through working with the NDP. I certainly don’t agree with every policy and pronouncement of the party. We live in a democracy – you aren’t supposed to.

But it’s offered me an opportunity to contribute directly to improving my society, and access to networks that can build a more free, more dignified society. So that’s what I’m proud of, and what I want to keep working on.

One of our district’s regular supporters gave a short speech at the meeting about the dark places our society has gone in the last year. He put a lot of the blame on progressive politics and politicians – we’ve dropped the ball and given up on a lot of our core policies and values at the highest levels of our political parties.

He called on us to fight harder than ever for a dignified society. Now we can’t do anything but, if we want to live with ourselves at the end of the long night.